


you defied inevitability, john egbert, and the rest of us had to deal with it

by regbian



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Gen, and this fic kind of explores that!, from jade's point of view though, i love the prospit siblings because their relationship has so much potential, that's it that's the story, they both look at each other as someone from another timeline, they're both quite literally dead to each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:08:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21867271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regbian/pseuds/regbian
Summary: Maybe - and this is just a thought - being alone in space in what seems like a doomed timeline isn't the best way to spend three years.
Relationships: John Egbert & Jade Harley
Comments: 1
Kudos: 23





	you defied inevitability, john egbert, and the rest of us had to deal with it

Jade Harley is sitting across from a brother.

He is shorter than her, with black hair, dark skin, and deep blue eyes, framed by square glasses. His teeth jut out from his mouth, even more so than hers. His hands are folded on the table, his eyes cast downwards. Everything that radiates from him is so strangely familiar yet alien at the same time, the dead ringer of some forgotten memory.

She lifts her cup of tea to her mouth. Sips, swallows. It burns her tongue.

“So,” John says.

Jade doesn’t respond.

John scratches the back of his head, a small smile twitching awkwardly at the corner of his lips. “Three years, huh?”

Jade doesn’t know whether or not he’s saying that to himself or to her, but she hardly knows anything anymore, so she just nods. “Three years,” she says. Her voice is so much flatter than it used to be.

“It’s….” John looks up, glances at her eyes, and looks back down again. “It’s been a while.”

Jade doesn’t know how to respond to that, so she just takes another sip of her tea to give herself time to think. After a moment, she puts her cup down. “It has, hasn’t it?”

John keeps looking at her, like he expects her to talk some more, but that’s not something Jade thinks she’s capable of doing. She hasn’t kept a real conversation alive since she was thirteen, and, even then, it was online. Most of the interactions she used to have that involved actually speaking, in real life, were mainly her yelling at her dog.

Eventually, a few minutes of sustained, uncomfortable sitting and staring gets to John, and he looks back down. Stirs his own tea, absentmindedly. It’s still too hot for him to drink.

John seems bothered by the lack of conversation. Jade doesn’t see why. This feels perfectly normal - just sitting around in silence and thinking about how you got here.

So they sit like that, John shifting uncomfortably, Jade perfectly still, taking turns staring at each other and at the table, until John sighs particularly loudly, catching Jade’s attention.

“This is _so_ fucking awkward,” he says.

A few years and a timeline ago, Jade would have laughed at that. She would have agreed, snorting, and made a remark about how stupid they were being. She can almost picture it:

A different Jade is replaced with her. Her hair is a little more wild, her clothes far less rumpled. She hasn’t made the slightest effort to clean the dirt off of her hands, because it’s _John_ , what’ll he care if she looks like she just rolled out of a pigsty? They’re _siblings_! They know each other!

The different, happier Jade has been waiting for John to mention how awkward they’ve been being, and once he does she nods eagerly, and launches into some esoteric tangent about how her gardening is going and how she’s _so_ sorry she’s been distant this past hour, it’s just that she’s been zoning out thinking about one of her many, many interests! She hopes he understands.

And this different, happier John understands, because he knows Jade, and he laughs too. He admits that he’s been thinking about some new game he’s been playing, or about _Ghostbusters_ again, or some problem in his code that he can’t figure out for some reason, _god_ , he hates Java.

And then they laugh together, because they’re siblings and they get it, and maybe they actually start talking, or maybe they lapse back into silence, but this time it’s comfortable, shared between them with an air of camaraderie and not of discomfort.

It’s a good picture. Just about as good as any other fantasy Jade’s conjured up in the past three years: colorful and rich in her mind, but embarrassingly unreal.

Jade is snapped out of her fantasy by John clearing his throat. It’s annoyingly loud, and a little disruptive, but Jade doesn’t say anything about it. Instead, she just looks up at the brother in front of her.

“Is everything…okay?” he asks.

Jade tilts her head to the side, her ears pricking up in confusion. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

John rubs the back of his neck, says, “Well-,” stops, rubs the back of his neck again, and then shakes his head. It’s a whole show of actions, and Jade is distantly reminded of those old puppet shows Dave used to send her links for, with the guys moving with jolting and unnatural movements. John seems like that now. If Jade were younger, or from some other timeline, maybe she would have pointed it out. As it stands, though, she just takes another sip of her tea.

John makes an annoyed grunt. “Jade, you’ve been alone for three years. I was- I was _dead_.” John’s voice is imploring. “Davesprite was dead. You can’t just- you can’t just come out from that, can you?”

Jade blinks, slowly. Then she shrugs, equally as slowly. “I can come out of a lot of things just fine,” is what she decides to say.

John shakes his head. Jade thinks he’s going to get a headache from all that head-shaking he’s doing, but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t really say much, anymore.

“Yeah, you can come out of a lot of things fine, I know,” John says. “But, like, this has to have messed even you up, right?”

Jade shrugs. “Does it really matter? It had to happen. There’s no use moaning about inevitabilities.” John stares at her, a little open-mouthed. She shrugs again. “What? I’m just telling you the truth. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m messed up about it, because if I am, Paradox Space needs me to be. That’s really all there is to it.”

John grits his teeth a little. “I don’t think that’s all there is to it at all.”

Jade cocks her head to the side. “You’re a programmer, right, John?” she asks.

John nods, slowly, confusion evident in his features.

“Well, think about it this way: our universe - or multiverse, I guess would be the better name for it - is just one giant program. It’s all, quite literally, a game. It’s the computer simulation theory of the universe confirmed without an inch of doubt,” she says. “And when you’re making a game, or programming anything, you can’t really put that many frivolous lines of code in, if any. You just punch in what you need to be there, and leave everything else out, because if you don’t, a glitch will come along, and when you’re trying to figure out what went wrong so you can fix it, it’s all gonna be one big, confusing mess.”

John raises an eyebrow. “I don’t see where you’re-”

Jade cuts him off. “What I’m trying to say is, we’re all just objects in the universe, and we’re treated that way. We don’t have or do anything that we don’t need or don’t need to. So it’s useless to ask questions like ‘why,’ because the answer is always going to be the same: because it needed to happen.” She shrugs, allowing a small smile to slip onto her face. “It’s depressing, but it’s the truth. Sorry.”

Some type of look passes upon John’s face. Jade can’t find it in herself to know what he’s thinking. She may have, in another life, but his expressions, his movements, still feel so odd to her. So off. So different. So unnatural.

He’s a dead man walking. She wonders if John feels the same way about her.

“Jade,” John says, “I think I’m done with inevitability.”

“I don’t think you can ever be done with the way everything has to go.”

“No, but- but look at it this way: I can change things. I watched everyone die, right in front of me, and I thought none of you were ever gonna come back. But then you did! Because I went and I _changed things_.” There’s a fire in John’s eyes that Jade doesn’t remember. She wishes it felt warm and not like it was going to burn through her skin, but she, more than anyone else, knows that you can’t always get what you want. Maybe Jade can never get what she wants.

“We have all changed things,” Jade says. “And we all did it because we had to.”

“Jade, you’re not understanding,” John says. He’s getting frustrated with her, that much she can tell. “I changed things, and I wasn’t supposed to. I did something completely off-script. I was a _glitch_ , don’t you see?”

John is standing up out of his chair. He looks intense. Jade wonders how long he’s wanted to talk about this, so she just stays quiet and looks at him as he rants.

“I was a glitch, and I did something I wasn’t supposed to, okay? I defied inevitability. It - inevitability - doesn’t really mean that much.” All of a sudden, his eyes turn softer, and he looks at Jade. “You don’t have to care about inevitability.”

But Jade is too distracted by what John said to really care about the inspirational message he's trying to get through to her.

John defied inevitability - that much seems true enough, Jade knows enough about computers and robots to know that glitches happen, and she knows that it’s very likely that John was a glitch - but, by doing so, he did…he did whatever _this_ is to her.

If Jade can’t dismiss everything that happens to her with the excuse of inevitability, well…

She’s not entirely sure how she’s going to get by these next few infinite years.

John is staring at her, waiting for a response. Jade brings her hands to her head, slowly, painfully slowly. “What…what happened was not inevitable,” she says. “It was not inevitable.”

John’s face brightens. “Exactly!” he says, “It wasn’t.”

Jade brings her eyes to John’s, and before his face even crumples she knows she’s crying. “It wasn’t inevitable,” she says. “I could be dead.”

John moves forward, and Jade moves back. “I could be dead right now, John. I could be dead with you and Davesprite, and I’m not. _Why am I not dead_?”

Jade’s voice is rising, getting higher and higher pitched. “Why am I not dead, John? Why am I here? Why did I not die a just death? Why did you do that?” Tears are streaming down her face. She could be dead! She could be dead and dismiss it with inevitability, but instead she’s here, sitting in a house on Earth C with a daunting eternity in front of her, and she can’t move on from the game anymore because she actually has to _think_ about what it did.

“I- Jade, I’m-” John is stumbling over his words, clearly not expecting this reaction from Jade. She’s embarrassed that she’s crying like this in front of him, because she thought she’d gotten all her tears out three years ago, but it doesn’t seem like something she can stop.

A sick, cruel voice in her head laughs. This whole _breakdown_ was inevitable. Out of everything in her life, of course this was the one inevitability.

 _There’s some irony for the Striders_ , Jade thinks. _I hope they appreciate it_.

John puts a warm hand on Jade’s back, because, at some point, she’s put her head down on the table. John is rubbing circles around her shoulder blades and telling her it’s okay, but Jade can hear the uncertainty in his voice, can sense the “What the fuck?” running through his brain right now.

She feels strangely divorced from her body, like none of this is real. Like it’s not happening. It’s the same feeling she got when John and Davesprite died, and the feeling she got again when John was alive and Davesprite was Davepeta and nothing made sense.

Nothing has made sense, since then. Jade really needs everything to just _stop_ if she’s ever going to be okay again.

“Jade, uh, calm down, it’s fine, it’s-” John is being really tentative, clearly nervous, and Jade feels, for a second, that he deserves to feel this way.

 _You_ should _be worried_ , she thinks. _You_ should _pay for what you’ve done to me. Look at me; I’m a wreck. I thought I was doomed. I_ wished _I was doomed. And it was you that did that, and you didn’t do it because you had to. You just did it. You defied inevitability, John Egbert, and the rest of us had to deal with it._

But she realizes that she shouldn’t blame him, because that’s just silly. Because John genuinely thought he was helping, and, Jade guesses, to Rose and Dave and Jane and Jake and Roxy and Dirk and the trolls and everyone else in the universe, he was helping. He just forgot about her.

But what’s Jade’s happiness, compared to the happiness of her universe? Of her friends?

It’s an atom; it’s hardly anything at all.

For some odd reason that she can’t place, this thought just makes her cry harder.

Jesus, she’s mortified.

John is still next to her, still witnessing all her weaknesses come out in one loud, embarrassing, snotty tempest, and it’s this that forces Jade to regain her composure. She moves John’s hand off of her back, takes a deep breath, and sits up. She doesn’t look at John as she takes her glasses off her face and wipes them with her shirt. She stares into the distance, away from everything, as she resolutely turns her wobbling chin into an expression of pure neutrality.

Her tea lays forgotten on the table. She picks it up, takes a sip. Swallows. It’s gone cold.

Jade isn’t looking at John, but she can feel his eyes on here, boring into her soul, searching for some potential cause of that outburst. When Jade finally feels like she can speak again without sobbing, she turns her head slightly toward him, just enough so that a brother’s face comes into her peripheral vision.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I think it’s better to just let everything play out the way it was supposed to.”

Jade Harley is sitting at a table, and a brother is crouching next to her. Neither are speaking.

Jade takes another sip of her tea until all the dregs are gone.

**Author's Note:**

> hey!!! this fic is really sad because i was just. thinking about jade harley (you know as i do) and, well. this happened. i love her and her emotions. thank you for coming to my ted talk
> 
> follow me on tumblr @lesjade :D


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